|
Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: Even Unions Are
Turning on Obamacare
Amy Payne and Chris Jacobs
July 16, 2013
It’s
not every day that union
bosses sound like policy experts at The Heritage Foundation.
But
the beginning of the Obamacare
letter from the heads of three major unions—the Teamsters, the United
Food and
Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE—to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and
House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is eerily similar to our experts’
writings.
The
unions, of course, were heavy
supporters of Obamacare, but even they can’t deny its effects now.
“When
you and the President sought
our support for the Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked
the
health plans we have now, we could keep them,” they wrote. “Sadly, that
promise
is under threat.”
It
gets worse:
The
unintended consequences of the
ACA are severe. Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare
scenarios:
First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’
work hours
below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’
hours to
avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact
is
two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current
health
benefits.
We
couldn’t agree more. In fact,
not only did Heritage experts predict these outcomes, but the
non-partisan
Medicare actuary also concluded the law would raise health costs by
hundreds of
billions of dollars. The Congressional Budget Office noted that
Obamacare’s
employer mandate “will probably cause some employers to respond by
hiring fewer
low-wage workers.”
Naturally,
it’s on the question of
solutions that we diverge from the unions.
The
union leaders’ “solution” to
these problems involves yet more government spending. They want to make
union-run health plans eligible for Obamacare’s subsidies—subsidies
that were
supposed to go to people with no health coverage. In other words,
increase
taxpayer spending even more because of the consequences of bigger
government…
Read
the rest of the article at The
Heritage Foundation
|
